Gary Webb is a veteran investigative journalist, author of three books on the CIA, and winner of the George Polk Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, and a number of other journalistic honors. He wrote a story in 1996 for The San Jose Mercury News which eventually led to the subsequent book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. According to Gary Webb's book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, Gary Webb first began investigating covert U.S. government operations in Nicaragua during the 1980s under the Reagan administration
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He first became interested in this subject after he noticed that cocaine traffickers were openly moving their cocaine through California and into other parts of the United States under the protection of US-backed Contra forces. During his investigation he found that these drug traffickers were backed by wealthy people close to Ronald Reagan's campaign who were making huge profits from cocaine trafficking. The investigators also discovered that members of Contra paramilitary groups were involved with these drug traffickers.